


Investiture

by Cygna_hime



Category: Homestuck
Genre: D/s, F/M, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-25
Updated: 2012-01-25
Packaged: 2017-10-30 02:17:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/326672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cygna_hime/pseuds/Cygna_hime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose takes the weight of the world from Karkat's shoulders.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Investiture

Rose, quite clearly, has a plan, or rather a Plan: it fully deserves the capital letter, if the way she reels off lists of resources to allocate, preparations to make, equipment to build, tasks to perform is any indication. Though Karkat knows, intellectually, that she’s had no more time to process recent events than anyone has, and less than Aradia, his viscera disagree. She projects confidence the way he knows he never did. It’s easy to do what she says, not just easier than having the alternative argument but actively, positively easy.

He barely speaks to her for the first few hours. What he has to do is obvious: stabilize the strange Dersite until someone whose mind isn’t full of nothing but heartbeat can assess the damage and do something to stop him bleeding out as soon as Karkat lets go. Gamzee stays with him, blessedly quiet and even more blessedly not getting in trouble. Karkat breathes more easily with him there. He doesn’t have to worry about what his body is doing, about being distracted or letting go or faceplanting in the wound he’s holding shut: his moirail will take care of it. As long as Gamzee’s body is pressed up close behind his, Karkat can let his attention dwindle to turning the flow of blood aside every time it threatens to wash out over his hands.

Eventually, Gamzee lifts him bodily off and away, and only then does he realize his job is done. His hands are covered in red, but the wound is closed and will stay that way.

When Rose begins to issue assignments, he doesn’t notice what she’s doing at first. She starts with Kanaya and the other human, which makes sense: she knows them and their skills best. Then she sends Aradia and Sollux away, or rather listens to Aradia’s plan and approves it. That’s easy and obvious too. But then she talks to _Gamzee_ in a low voice that Karkat can’t hear, until Gamzee shrugs assent and ambles _out of the room_ , and when Karkat starts after him – he shouldn’t be left alone; Karkat shouldn’t leave him alone – Terezi grabs him by the wrist and is impossible to budge.

“What the fuck?” he demands of Rose, quite reasonably in his opinion. “What do you think you’re doing? Do you _want_ everyone to die? Is that your great plan? You died and it worked out great so everyone should join in?”

“No one is going to die,” she replies, serene as only a Seer can be. Then she adds, “At least, not in the immediate future.”

“Sure, great, he’ll just maim someone or start hiding corpse parts in all the storageblocks or fall down a ventilation shaft and break his legs or – let me the fuck go, Terezi!” He insists for Gamzee’s sake. Gamzee is his _moirail_ , which these humans still don’t understand as much as they think. Moirails shouldn’t be separated, especially not in this kind of delicate situation so early in their relationship.

It has nothing to do with how used a bare few hours has made Karkat to having Gamzee at his back, he tells himself. If he feels less safe, it’s because of what Gamzee might be doing elsewhere, not because he actively liked having Gamzee present.

“He will not harm anyone!” Terezi says, and it just figures that she’s ganging up on him. This is his life. He shouldn’t have let romance make him feel like anyone would actually be on his side. “I have been seeing his choices with the greatest scruples!”

“And I am certain he will not come to harm, himself. The task I asked him to perform is one well within his capabilities, and I assure you that no accident will befall him. He will have all the good fortune he needs to remain safe.”

Stupid Seers and their stupid omniscient bullshit. Karkat hates knowing that they’re right, that they will always be right and he could argue forever without being the slightest bit vindicated. He hates even worse that no matter how much it grates on him, he can’t want them to be wrong about this.

“Fine,” he says, like it’s unimportant and he hasn’t made a complete idiot of himself by arguing with them. “But when I’m stuck picking up the pieces of his sanity, _again_ , because your Dave human decided to open his smart-ass mouth, _again_ , I’ll want it on record that it will be your fault and not mine for not letting me do my job.”

“Duly noted,” says Rose, and Terezi lets go of his wrist and – and leaves, whisking out the door and shutting it behind her like she has somewhere to be, which maybe she does, but so does Karkat, or at least he will once Rose gets around to telling him where that is.

She’s not going to. All in a moment, he’s sure: she doesn’t have anything she wants him to do, because he’s failed – worse than failed; failure is just lack of success, while Karkat has managed to fail so intensely as to render the very concept of unfailure meaningless – at everything he’s ever tried and _she knows it_ , she knows everything, so even if some people who do have value are inexplicably too fond of him to cull him for treasonous incompetence, she’s not going to let him just run around fucking shit up all over again. She kept him for last so she can tell him so, to give him the bone-liquefying dressing-down warranted by the intensity of his incompetence. He should be grateful she’s not telling him what she thinks of him in front of everyone. Maybe that comes later. Maybe human culture has a multistage disgrace procedure with both public and private elements. Maybe –

“Karkat.”

He’s not sure if human and troll vocal inflections translate, but she doesn’t sound angry, or even disappointed. She sounds – he jerks his head up from staring at the blood spatters on the floor in obsessive detail – and she is. She’s smiling.

He opens his mouth to say something, he doesn’t know what (he hardly ever does), but before the words can reassemble themselves Rose shakes her head. “No talking.”

“What the fuck do you—“

“I said, no talking.” There’s just enough steel underlying her voice to bring him up sharp. He shuts his mouth. “Good.”

With his mouth shut he can’t ask what she wants, can’t yell at her for being in cahoots with Terezi like it isn’t even a thing, can’t apologize for all the things he fucked up that fucked her up and brought her here to the precise mathematical center of nowhere, can’t, when it comes right down to it, do anything at all. So he doesn’t. It feels surprisingly not-horrible, even though he knows it won’t last long.

He’s doing it wrong somehow anyway, which should be some kind of award. Karkat Vantas: can’t even do nothing right. Rose shakes her head again and gives him a look he has no way to interpret, a look he’s seen in pieces before but never really understood then either.

She takes his face in her hands and draws him close, and he goes silently, not asking, not complaining, not pulling away. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but she so clearly does that he’s okay with that. At the last possible point, she whispers, “Breathe with me,” and then she kisses him.

He’s never been kissed like this before. Her hands are still on his face, holding him where she wants him, and her lips are warm on his. She kisses him carefully, confidently, like she’s taking possession of him, and he lets her. He doesn’t know what’s going on, he shouldn’t be letting her do this, but his quadrantmates left him with her knowing what would happen – he knows they knew, suddenly, expressions and whispers sliding together no longer cryptic – and if they approve, if they trust him with Rose, Rose with him, then there’s nothing to fear, absolutely nothing.

Rose kisses him until he drowns in it, until he lets go and breathes against her, into her, with her. The words pressed up behind his teeth curl up and blow away like leaves in the dark season.

Eventually and far too soon, she’s consumed every last bit of him and pulls away. He reaches for her instinctively, but when he raises his hands he sees the bright blood covering them, carapace-red, human-red, mutant-red, and it’s a daymare brought to life, the moment when he reaches for his sickles to defend himself from the culling drones and finds nothing there.

He wants to apologize again, suddenly and sickeningly, for everything but most of all for being here, tired and dirty and smeared with different colors of blood, and thinking even for a moment of touching her. He hides his hands behind his back, as though she can’t see them there just as easily now. The words are back, and he can either breathe or keep quiet but doesn’t have the energy to do both. She told him not to talk, gave it as an order, and it’s shamefully reassuring to let her make the choice for him.

“Give me your hands, Karkat.”

She pronounces his name strangely, the r flat and the t sharp. He wants to tell her no, but he can’t – she’s the leader, now, and more than that she owns him now in a way he can’t describe. He’s in a fragile space of four walls and a locked door where there’s nobody he needs to chase after and no decisions to make. Rose is in control of everything. It’s just them. It’s fine.

He holds out his hands.

The cloth she pulls from her sylladex is softer than any he’s ever felt before and painfully pristine. Rose cleans the blood from his hands the same way she’s been doing everything: precise and careful, as though he’s worth an effort. He couldn’t breathe if he wanted to right now, the smooth slide of fabric, warm pressure points of her fingers on his with a single layer of cloth between take his breath away to somewhere he can’t follow.

One hand, two, and she lets them fall, only to come closer still. She whispers, “Breathe,” in his ear as she wipes the blood from his cheek, and he breathes, in with her, out with her. Her breath is coming quickly, the only sign that she feels anything. He is unspeakably relieved. He would soak himself in blood in this moment, if she would stay to wipe it away.

She looks at him then, the sun in her strange human eyes, and she could consume him, burn him to ash, at this time and in this place, and he wouldn’t care. She can see him through and through, and he is filled with her regard like a heatless fire.

When she takes a step back, he follows, helpless and yearning though he still doesn’t know for what, but she holds him at bay with one terrifying hand. The bloody cloth flutters down from it to the floor.

“Watch.” A light springs from her fingers, and the cloth ignites. Karkat watches it burn, watches Rose watch it burn. “I don’t pretend to know precisely what happened to you, but it’s over. You did well, no matter what you think, better than anyone asked of you. It’s done. You can let it go.”

The ash blows away as he falls forward into her arms.

He doesn’t know what he wants, not in any real way. But Rose does, and they’re kissing – she bends to him, and it would be embarrassing to be so small if he hadn’t seen her with the others and didn’t know she was tall – and she’s holding him, pulling him close, closer, closest. It’s everything he wants and not enough. He wants to touch her. He doesn’t want to touch her. He wants her to tell him to touch her.

Instead, she touches him, hands slipping under the hem of his shirt and leaving burning handprints up his spine. He doesn’t dare do the same to her, and when her searching hands find his grubleg stubs he can’t do anything at all besides keen and lean still closer into her. She won’t let him, not until she sweeps his shirt over his head with one smooth motion, and it’s the most bereft second of his life.

She strokes over them again, over and over, kissing the sounds out of his mouth, and when his legs won’t hold she sinks down with him to the floor. She’s still perfectly clothed, and he’s torn: he should want to touch her back, strip her as bare as he is, but he doesn’t want to, and he doesn’t think she wants him to either, but then why is she touching him?

She presses his shoulders down onto the ground and a kiss to the hollow between his clavicular protrusions, and he stops asking even himself. She wants what she wants, and he doesn’t have to question her anymore.

Rose’s fingernails are too blunt to break his skin, but she doesn’t try, doesn’t have to when her hands could set him literally burning with a moment of her will. He doesn’t care. She can do anything she wants with him right now, and he won’t mind. He lies splayed out for her, and her gaze takes him to pieces like a corpse before a mortissectionist. Her hands strip him of the rest of his clothes while her mouth strips him of everything else – kisses pressed to his grubleg stubs, one to each with a painful precision.

By the time he’s naked under her, there’s nothing left of him to care about what she sees. He’s not sure she hasn’t set him on fire after all, the way his nerves come alight under her touch. Sounds come out of his mouth that he never knew he had in him before, and she plays him like an instrument, one made for her hand.

He doesn’t know how she knows when he’s close, what that sounds like, but she does. She has a pail ready – he doesn’t wonder where she got it from; he’s beyond wondering – and draws him up to his knees, places the pail just right between his thighs, kneels behind him herself, body warm and enveloping, unmistakably _present_ as she strokes him the last little way to weightless, mindless bliss.

She holds him, after, legs tangled, as he begins to reassemble himself from nothing. His head rests on her chest, and he can hear her pulse. It’s fast, faster than any normal troll’s, but his is a perfect match for it.

“What…is this?” he eventually finds the energy to ask. He should be worried, should be guilty: this has to be either red or pale infidelity if not both. He’s just a little too dazed to care.

“I don’t know if troll culture has a word for it,” Rose says, slow, deliberative, sincere. “I don’t know if human culture does, either. Call it something you needed, at the moment.”

She’s still dressed, and he’s almost positive humans don’t get off that way. Hot shame finds a way through the fog of satiation. “I should – do you –“

“No,” she answers before he can get tangled in his own words again. “For a variety of reasons, I don’t, and you shouldn’t. I’ll let you know if I want something from you, but for now, this is good.”

The words are coming back, but they’re still so tangled up in themselves that the only one to escape is, “ _Why?_ ”

Rose smiles against the top of his head. “Because it was what you needed, and what you need is my business now. Because,” she says, sweet and sure, “you’re mine.”


End file.
